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NBD - Aerodyne Jazz Bass (I’m a terrible liar)


AndyTravis

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A friend…ahem,

 

May have happened across a Fender Aerodyne Jazz bass…

 

Has anyone among these pages had much experience with them - it’s been years (about eight…) since I’ve played one - And a lot of my prior experience was filing nuts and setting them up in BEAD tunings for lads who’d splashed their student loans on them.

 

How are the stock pickups…

 

This mate of mine…they play funky stuff, rather than the rock/metal they seem to be used for.

 

I know Fender did a Dimarzio (DMC) edition for the Japanese market.

 

Just general musings for an evenings thinking…

Edited by AndyTravis
I lied, I buyed…
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9 hours ago, AndyTravis said:

A friend…ahem,

 

May have happened across a Fender Aerodyne Jazz bass…

 

Has anyone among these pages had much experience with them - it’s been years (about eight…) since I’ve played one - And a lot of my prior experience was filing nuts and setting them up in BEAD tunings for lads who’d splashed their student loans on them.

 

How are the stock pickups…

 

This mate of mine…they play funky stuff, rather than the rock/metal they seem to be used for.

 

I know Fender did a Dimarzio (DMC) edition for the Japanese market.

 

Just general musings for an evenings thinking…

I bought one from here a while back and love it. My only complaints are:

1) it’s just too pretty and feels like it wouldn’t take much punishment.
2) I’n used to the P bass shape and find the offset body is taking a bit of adjustment to get used to.

Its a quality bass though and the neck is superb. For its price band, particularly used, it’s a lot of bass for not a lot of cash.

The stock pups are fine but I have a set of Geezers that I had in another bass so replaced the stock pups with these. To me it’s a big improvement, but that may be more down to personal preference/familiarity.

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I recently sold mine, not because there was anything wrong with it, in fact the opposite but arthritis in my left hand  is forcing me to go short scale. They are great bases but IMO the stock pickups were a bit weak. I put a DiMarzio set in which really gave it a new lease of life, plus they were a lot quieter. That mod plus, shielding the cavities with copper tape made it really quiet on standby. The DiMarzios have four wires, giving you the option of clever wiring combinations, should you wish (parallel/series on a push/pull, etc), or you can just use them vanilla. 
 

They have a super fast neck and are quite a lot lighter than your average J bass. They also look great with the lacquer style finish and top binding. The body does end up with lots of superficial scratches but I don’t think it is any more fragile than other finishes.
 

Another common mod you might want to do is to change the standard bridge for something a bit chunkier. It is quite difficult to find one in the smoked chrome finish. Gotoh do one but be warned, if you have one of the models with the controls mounted through the body, rather than on a standard J bass metal plate, the top is carved (convex). In order to mount the standard bridge level, the top has a very shallow indent for the bridge. This route is not big enough to accommodate the larger base plate of the Gotoh (or any other) higher mass bridge. You therefore end up with the choice of enlarging the indent, or putting a spacer in so the new bridge will sit level. I gave it to a Luthier to sort out and he went for the spacer so as not to do a non-reversible modification. This required the neck to be shimmed to compensate for the slightly higher bridge. It all worked out very well but it wasn’t as straight forward as your average Fender bridge upgrade.

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Not much more to add to the comments above.

 

Hum from the bridge pup was the reason I swapped out the pup's to Dimarzio pj's. I have creme ones, which also look cool with DR Black Beauties.

 

Otherwise, a nice light and resonant (basswood) body and super fast neck. The body dings up pretty fast and the black ones are fingerprint magnets!

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I had one until recently, I liked it, even with the stock pickups, although I can see why people think they were a bit weak, although not noisy. I tried it with black beuties too, although I didn't like the feel of the strings, but the colour was great! Great neck on them and would have used it a lot more if it had just had another string!

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I'm still kicking myself that I dithered over, and missed out on, the blue Precision one a few years ago. 

 

The only time I've seen Dave the grumpy Canadian YouTube guitar bloke truly happy was playing his red Aerodyne P. 

Edited by Maude
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2 minutes ago, Maude said:

I'm still kicking myself that I dithered over, and missed out on, the blue Precision one a few years ago. 

It's local and I will get it 😉

 

The only time I've seen Dave the grumpy Canadian YouTube guitar bloke truly happy was playing his red Aerodyne P. 

 

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